BEYOND their feelings of sadness and shock, friends of Eliot and Silda Spitzer are feeling aggravation at Lloyd Constantine, the disgraced former governor’s longtime friend and senior adviser, over his self-aggrandizing comments to the press.

While most of the Spitzers’ friends refused to give interviews, or at least declined to be quoted by name, Constantine’s name popped up constantly in the week that Spitzer publicly crashed and burned. “It’s annoying to see a guy who’s supposed to be a friend profiting on Eliot’s downfall,” said one Spitzer pal who didn’t want his name used.

A week ago – two days after the news broke that Spitzer was the Emperors Club prostitution ring’s Client No. 9 – Constantine was quoted:

“I have tremendous insight into what she [Silda] is going through. Right now, what I’m trying to do, as a friend of Eliot and Silda’s, is to be as helpful as possible to them and to their family and to the people of the state of New York. And at this time, that does not involve talking about what they may have shared with me.”

But Constantine did talk. After advising Spitzer on Sunday and Monday to ride out the storm despite calls for him to resign, he told the New York Sun on Tuesday, “There’s only one decision-maker on this, and it’s not me, and it’s not the press. It’s the governor . . . This is hard for him.”

Constantine, 59, might feel entitled to say whatever he wants about Spitzer, 48, who worked for him as a law school summer intern in 1982, when Constantine was an assistant state attorney general under Robert Abrams.

The older man gave the younger a job at his antitrust law firm, Constantine Cannon, when Spitzer was between government jobs. So when Spitzer became governor, he made Constantine his “senior adviser.”

One source said, “Lloyd went in without portfolio. He didn’t have day-to-day obligations, so he could stick his nose in wherever he wanted. He’s gotten so full of himself.”

Constantine, who doesn’t suffer from modesty, bragged to the Sun in January, “I’m sort of a monster man. I’m kind of a rover.”

He also bragged about Spitzer, “He’s a new type of statesman . . . He’s very pragmatic. He understands business. He understands money . . . I saw this in him very, very early on. I saw someone who had the stuff to be exactly where he is right now.” Exactly.